Compelling archaeological evidence of an occupation older than Clovis (~12.8 to 13.1 thousand years ago) in North America is present at only a few sites, and the stone tool assemblages from these sites are small and varied. The Debra L. Friedkin site, Texas, contains an assemblage of 15,528 artifacts that define the Buttermilk Creek Complex, which stratigraphically underlies a Clovis assemblage and dates between ~13.2 and 15.5 thousand years ago. The Buttermilk Creek Complex confirms the emerging view that people occupied the Americas before Clovis and provides a large artifact assemblage to explore Clovis origins.

When did humans colonize the Americas? From where did they come and what routes did they take?

These questions have gripped scientists for decades, but until recently answers have proven difficult to find. Current genetic evidence implies dispersal from a single Siberian population toward the Bering Land Bridge no earlier than about 30,000 years ago (and possibly after 22,000 years ago), then migration from Beringia to the Americas sometime after 16,500 years ago.

The archaeological sites in North and South America are dating to as early as 15,000 years ago. If this is the time of colonization, geological data from western Canada suggest that humans dispersed along the recently deglaciated Pacific coastline.

Scientists in Britain have identified the oldest skeleton ever found on the American continent in a discovery that raises fresh questions about the accepted theory of how the first people arrived in the New World.

Scientists in Britain have identified the oldest skeleton ever found on the American continent in a discovery that raises fresh questions about the accepted theory of how the first people arrived in the New World.

The skeleton’s perfectly preserved skull belonged to a 26-year-old woman who died during the last ice age on the edge of a giant prehistoric lake which once formed around an area now occupied by the sprawling suburbs of Mexico City.

Scientists from Liverpool’s John Moores University and Oxford’s Research Laboratory of Archaeology have dated the skull to about 13,000 years old, making it 2,000 years older than the previous record for the continent’s oldest human remains.

However, the most intriguing aspect of the skull is that it is long and narrow and typically Caucasian in appearance, like the heads of white, western Europeans today.

Modern-day native Americans, however, have short, wide skulls that are typical of their Mongoloid ancestors who are known to have crossed into America from Asia on an ice-age land bridge that had formed across the Bering Strait.

... the notion that people at this time period were bison hunters in Northern Alaska is being put to the test; twelve thousand years ago, what is now moist tundra was a drier, grassier, landscape grazed by animals that included bison, but caribou bones are what scientists are finding at Raven Bluff so far.

Another established scientific hypothesis being tested is how the use of certain stone tools spread in North America. The lower levels of the site produced a very significant find of a roughly 12,000 year-old fluted projectile point base, marking the first time such a tool has been definitely dated in the north.

“The idea for decades has been that fluted projectile point technology originated in Alaska or perhaps Siberia and was carried south into the Americas,” explains Rasic. This model suggests that the Raven Bluff tool should be older than similar points found further south on the continent. “We’re finding the opposite of what people expected.

"The Raven Bluff points are younger than Clovis, so it may be that they did not originate in the north, but came from the south. So the question now is, does this represent a migration of people, or the spread of an idea from the south?”

Raven Bluff will continue to shed further light on the initial phases of human settlement in the Americas when Rasic, Hedman and company return to the dig this August and face the familiar challenges of such frontier scientists : mosquitoes, no running water, permafrost, curious or hungry grizzlies that interrupt camp. Check it out:

Use of a geology-style drill pioneers a novel method for detecting the presence of past civilizations[/i]

A team of Canadian scientists has used geology-style drill cores from an Ontario lake bottom to gather evidence of toolmaking and perhaps even duckhunting by ancient aboriginals about 10,000 years ago -the first discovery of its kind in North America, and one that could point the way to further breakthroughs in underwater archeology around the world.

Did you know that a seafaring American tribe explored the shores of North America 7000 years ago? Or that these ancient Americans rivaled their European counterparts in navigational skills several millennia before the Vikings?

THE MYSTERY OF THE LOST RED PAINT PEOPLE follows U.S., Canadian, and European scientists from the barrens of Labrador - where archaeologists uncover an ancient stone burial mound - to sites in the U.S., France, England, and Denmark, and to the vast fjords of northernmost Norway where monumental standing stones testify to links among seafaring cultures across immense distances.

This film represents the first publication in any medium that has synthesized these new discoveries and attempted to draw a picture of the northeastern sea peoples, whom scientists refer to as the Maritime Archaic.

"Decades ago, Gutorn Gjessing pointed out that the identical [Red Paint] culture was found in Norway. No one paid much attention to that, but more recent carbon-14 dating has shown that the identical cultures had identical dates, and people began to pay more attention. It is now admitted that this is a high latitude culture that obviously sailed the stormy north Atlantic and stretched from northwest Europe over to America. It seemingly extends from along the Atlantic coast of Europe to America and in America from the high latitudes of Labrador down into New York state.

"The dates are mind-boggling: 7,000 years ago both in Europe and America. That is 2,000 years earlier than the Great Pyramids of Egypt. It is at least 4,000 years earlier than the Mound Builders of the Ohio Valley. The evidence is cummulative, varied in nature, and most probably highly reliable."

New evidence suggests Stone Age hunters from Europe discovered America

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A remarkable series of several dozen European-style stone tools, dating back between 19,000 and 26,000 years, have been discovered at six locations along the US east coast. Three of the sites are on the Delmarva Peninsular in Maryland, discovered by archaeologist Dr Darrin Lowery of the University of Delaware. One is in Pennsylvania and another in Virginia. A sixth was discovered by scallop-dredging fishermen on the seabed 60 miles from the Virginian coast on what, in prehistoric times, would have been dry land.

The new discoveries are among the most important archaeological breakthroughs for several decades - and are set to add substantially to our understanding of humanity's spread around the globe.

The similarity between other later east coast US and European Stone Age stone tool technologies has been noted before. But all the US European-style tools, unearthed before the discovery or dating of the recently found or dated US east coast sites, were from around 15,000 years ago - long after Stone Age Europeans (the Solutrean cultures of France and Iberia) had ceased making such artefacts. Most archaeologists had therefore rejected any possibility of a connection. But the newly-discovered and recently-dated early Maryland and other US east coast Stone Age tools are from between 26,000 and 19,000 years ago - and are therefore contemporary with the virtually identical western European material.

New evidence suggests Stone Age hunters from Europe discovered America

A remarkable series of several dozen European-style stone tools, dating back between 19,000 and 26,000 years, have been discovered at six locations along the US east coast. Three of the sites are on the Delmarva Peninsular in Maryland, discovered by archaeologist Dr Darrin Lowery of the University of Delaware. One is in Pennsylvania and another in Virginia. A sixth was discovered by scallop-dredging fishermen on the seabed 60 miles from the Virginian coast on what, in prehistoric times, would have been dry land.

The new discoveries are among the most important archaeological breakthroughs for several decades - and are set to add substantially to our understanding of humanity's spread around the globe.

Drawing from original archaeological analysis, paleoclimatic research, and genetic studies, noted archaeologists Dennis J. Stanford and Bruce A. Bradley challenge the old narrative and, in the process, counter traditional—and often subjective—approaches to archaeological testing for historical relatedness. The authors apply rigorous scholarship to a hypothesis that places the technological antecedents of Clovis in Europe and posits that the first Americans crossed the Atlantic by boat and arrived earlier than previously thought. Supplying archaeological and oceanographic evidence to support this assertion, the book dismantles the old paradigm while persuasively linking Clovis technology with the culture of the Solutrean people who occupied France and Spain more than 20,000 years ago.

According to Nick Patterson, first author of the report, "There is a genetic link between the paleolithic population of Europe and modern Native Americans. The evidence is that the population that crossed the Bering Strait from Siberia into the Americas more than 15,000 years ago was likely related to the ancient population of Europe."

[...]

"This relationship between humans separated by the Atlantic Ocean reveals surprising features of the migration patterns of our ancestors, and reinforces the truth that all humans are closely related."

America was first discovered by Stone Age hunters from Europe, according to new archaeological evidence. Across six locations on the U.S. east coast, several dozen stone tools have been found.After close analysis it was discovered that they were between 19,000 and 26,000 years old and were a European-style of tool.

The discovery suggests that the owners of the tools arrived 10,000 years before the ancestors of the American Indians set foot in the New World, reported The Independent.